Blaine didn’t feel that Gomez was any less believable because he was a heroin addict under arrest and desperate for a deal that would get him back on the street.
“Did Freddy Gomez receive any compensation from the prosecutor’s office for his testimony at Mr. Henley’s preliminary hearing?” Mike asked.
“Not that I recall,” Blaine said, with a defiant lift of her chin.
“Do you recall why Freddy was in jail?”
“Not off hand.”
“Do you recall that it was for possession of heroin and felony assault with a deadly weapon?”
“No.”
“For trying to run his girlfriend over with a car?”
“No,” Blaine said, testily.
“And that he was looking at an attempted murder charge and a long time in prison?”
“No.” She turned her head toward the judge, as though asking him why he wasn’t putting a stop to Mike’s badgering.
“Were you aware that after he testified in Henley’s and Scanlon’s preliminary hearings, Mr. Gomez was permitted to plead guilty to simple battery and was sentenced to credit for time served?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Didn’t you make that deal with him?”
“Not if I wasn’t prosecuting him, and I wasn’t. Any plea bargain would have been made with the prosecutor in Mr. Gomez’s case.”
“So the fact that he walked free after testifying against Scanlon and my client didn’t have anything to do with his testimony?”
Laszlo objected to Mike’s question as argumentative, and the judge sustained it.
“You were aware,” Mike asked, “that two men had come forward to say Steve Scanlon had told them he committed the murder for the Aryan Brotherhood?”
“I saw no credible evidence,” she said, emphasizing “credible,” “that Scanlon killed Lindahl for anyone but Henley.”
“Did you believe Sunderland’s and Niedermeier’s statements?”
“I had no reason to believe that they weren’t truthful about what Scanlon told them. But I didn’t believe Scanlon, or that the Aryan Brotherhood was involved.”
Mike asked her why she had objected to them testifying at Howard’s trial. “Don’t you think the jury should have heard what Scanlon told them?”
Laszlo objected that the question was argument, and his objection was sustained.
Mike showed Blaine a copy of the McGaw letter and its envelope. She gave it a careless glance and handed it back to him.
“Do you remember seeing that letter before?” Mike asked.
“Yes,” Blaine said. “Mr. Willard emailed me a copy about a month ago.”
“Were you aware,” Mike asked, “that it was in your files of Mr. Henley’s case?”
“Not before talking with Mr. Willard,” Blaine said, glancing down at the letter with the slightest shake of her head. “It has been many years since Mr. Henley’s trial. But I certainly don’t remember ever seeing that letter before these proceedings.” Her voice held the merest hint of reproach.
“So you don’t remember whether you disclosed this letter to Mr. Henley or his advisory counsel?”
“No,” she said. “I’m sure I would have if it had seemed relevant.”
“What about Mr. Scanlon’s attorney?”
“Same thing. I just don’t remember.” She glanced at the letter again. “It’s possible I didn’t think it was relevant. It’s hard to read, but it just seems like a sort of hello letter. I don’t see anything about the case in it.”
“But weren’t you aware that Steve Scanlon told Keith Sunderland he had a letter from Cal McGaw in his car?”
“No.” She turned her head again toward the judge and then swept her gaze from Laszlo and Willard to Mike and me. “Realistically, I doubt that I’d have seen any reason to disclose this letter if I did have it. It didn’t exculpate Mr. Henley; on the face of it, it had nothing to do with Lindahl. There’s certainly nothing in it that appears to support what Scanlon said about the Aryan Brotherhood ordering him to kill Lindahl. And it certainly didn’t exculpate Scanlon. His defense was that he had nothing to do with Lindahl’s murder; the letter wouldn’t have helped him at all.”
“Okay,” Mike said. “That may be true of Scanlon. But wouldn’t the existence of the letter be exculpatory as to Mr. Henley because it corroborated what Sunderland said Scanlon told him?”
Blaine’s blandly professional manner buckled, and for a brief moment her face took on the pinched expression of a defensive bureaucrat. “I don’t see it. But even so, this all assumes that I was aware of the letter at the time. I assume you’re telling the truth that it was in my files, but I really do not remember it being there.” Her tone combined slight irritation with wounded integrity. “I would never prosecute someone if I had any doubt they were guilty,” she said. “I believe to this day that Howard Henley and Steve Scanlon killed Jared Lindahl.” Sandra Blaine, defender of truth, justice, and the American way. She gave a moment for her audience to absorb her performance, then exhaled as if signaling that, as far as she was concerned, the questioning was at an end.
On cross-examination, Frank Willard lobbed Blaine a few softball questions, indirectly reminding the judge that the Henley and Scanlon cases were very old and one could hardly be expected to remember every paper in a case file after all that time; that the letter, viewed objectively, was insignificant; that Blaine was an experienced and dedicated prosecutor with honed instincts about the credibility of witnesses; and that she was both legally and morally within her rights in keeping the jury from being confused by unfounded claims about Scanlon’s motive for killing Lindahl.
“They really closed ranks,” I said to Mike and Dot Henley, as we walked in a slow group down the hall from the courtroom.
“I’ll bet she knew about that letter,” Dot’s friend Lillian said. “She’s a piece of work, she is. She prosecuted my nephew for attempted murder after he was attacked by his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. Everyone said it was self-defense, but some jailhouse snitch got a deal for testifying that Donnie confessed he’d been planning to kill the guy. Blaine asked him on the stand whether he was getting anything for his testimony, and he said, no, he was just a concerned citizen. But Donnie’s lawyer found out he’d told a couple of guys at the jail that he was getting a no-jail-time deal on his case in exchange for putting Donnie away. He called those inmates as witnesses, and Donnie got off—no thanks to Miss Blaine.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty outrageous.”
She nodded, with a snap of her eyelids. “Yep. And look what she did to Howard. She has a reputation. But people don’t mind that sort of thing around here. They don’t mind if she cuts a few corners as long as she gets the right man. That’s why she’s the DA now. I say, just wait until she does that to someone you know who’s innocent, and see how you feel.”
“When is the next hearing?” Dot asked.
“November 29th,” Mike answered.
As we waved them off, Mike’s phone rang. After a brief conversation, he turned to me and said, “That was Marv Ingalls. He says he can meet us at six thirty tomorrow morning at the hotel coffee shop.”
“Son of a bitch,” I mumbled. “Doesn’t anyone here ever sleep?”
29
I, for one, slept that night, the sleep of the exhausted and relieved. We were coming back for more in less than a month, but I was just glad the hearing was over for now.
At 6:30 the next morning, when I made it downstairs to the coffee shop, Marv Ingalls, in uniform, was sitting in a booth, a cup of coffee in front of him. He looked like every cliché of a middle-aged cop nearing retirement—broad-faced, round-shouldered and getting thick in the waist. He stood up as I approached, and held out a hand. “Marv Ingalls,” he said, his voice a gravelly tenor. His wide, weathered face, behind his smile, kept that expression of controlled vigilance that policemen seem to acquire in their training.
“Janet Moodie,” I said, as we shook hands. “Mike Barry’
s co-counsel.”
“Nice to meet you.”
We sat. “I just got here; haven’t ordered yet,” he said.
Mike showed up as the waitress reached the table, and we all ordered coffee and food. Marv ordered scrambled eggs, fruit, and toast without butter. “My heart,” he said. “My wife and my doctor have me on a tight leash. So, what can I do for you?”
Mike did the talking. “We’re trying to find a guy who was supposedly busted for dealing in stolen guns back in 1999, when you were in property crimes. All we know about him is that he went by the name of Indio and supposedly worked in the oil fields.”
Marv cocked his head a little to one side. “You’re the lawyers here on that thing about Howard Henley, then?”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “How did you know?”
“Word gets around. Indio was part of that case. That’s how we learned about him. I remember it pretty well because we set up a sting to get him. We didn’t often get to do anything that elaborate, so it was pretty memorable.”
“Were you personally involved in it?”
“Yeah. I remember homicide and the DA were trying to get him to give them information about Henley’s case, but he lawyered up, wouldn’t tell them anything. I surmised he had some involvement with one of the prison gangs, and he was afraid to snitch.”
Our food came; Marv ate quickly, glancing at his watch from time to time.
“What happened to Indio?” Mike asked.
Marv took a bite of toast and thought for a few seconds. “As I recall he ended up pleading guilty and going to state prison.” He shrugged. “Kind of a shame, really. Maybe he could have shed some light on what really happened with Henley and that guy he supposedly had killed.”
“Did you know much about the case?”
“Not really. But I knew Henley, and I met his father a few times. Back when I was working patrol, old Howard was kind of a fixture, you know, the neighborhood loony, always having run-ins with the police. I don’t know what evidence the DA had on him, but the idea that he’d have killed anyone—or had his act together enough to hire a hit man—” He shook his head. “It all struck me as pretty damned improbable. He was all noise, and a bit of a pain in the neck, but basically harmless, near as I could tell.”
“Well, we’re trying to prove that now,” Mike said. “We’re trying to find Indio, in the hope he might have something to say now. But we don’t know his real name, so we’re kind of stuck.”
Marv took a drink of his coffee. “Forbush,” he said. “Wayne or Dwayne, something like that.”
“Great,” Mike said. “That will be a big help in locating him.”
“Hope so.” Marv checked his watch again, then pushed his plate away. “I’ve got to get to work soon. Is there anything else you need?” He looked around for the waitress.
“No, you’ve been a real help,” Mike said. “I’ll get breakfast; thank you for meeting us. Oh, by the way, a couple weeks from now we’ll be calling some prison inmates as witnesses; they’ll probably be housed in the jail. Can you tell me who I should call there to find out if they all got here?”
“Sure, no problem.” Marv reached in a pocket and pulled out a business card. “The deputy to call is Eloy Santos.” He wrote a name and phone number on the back of the card and handed it to Mike. Mike and I each gave him one of our cards.
He stood up, the holstered gun at his waist visible, and pulled on a heavy uniform jacket. “Gotta go,” he said. “Good luck with your hearing.”
After he was out of earshot, Mike said, “Well, that was a surprise.”
I nodded. “Really.”
“Funny,” he said, “but it kind of adds to the pressure. You know, people say it’s harder to defend someone who’s actually innocent, and they’re right. You feel like the stars ought to line up and everyone figure it out—especially with a case like this, with a confession from the actual killer, for God’s sake—but here we are. The judge and the AG don’t give a shit, and the hearing isn’t even going well. I’d feel bad enough for any client, guilty or not, but this is a whole lot worse.”
“I know,” I said, at a loss for encouraging words. “I feel it, too.”
“Yeah,” Mike said, and he shook himself out of his mood. “Oh, well, let’s see what we can find out about Indio.”
“I can go find his court file, if you want to start back now.” We’d driven down in our own cars this time, so that we could work separately on witness preparation and whatever else might be needed during breaks in the hearing.
“Thanks,” Mike said. “I’ll take you up on it. I have a lot of other work to do, to pay for this case.”
After checking out of the hotel, I drove to the county clerk’s office. A look through the felony index gave me a case, People v. Dwayne Robert Forbush, whose filing date fell within the period between Howard’s arrest and trial. I took down the number and joined the line at the desk.
Luck was with us; the file was still in the building, in the closed file archives. I gave the deputy clerk my ID and waited, reading emails on my phone, until she returned with the file. It was fairly thin, and I took it over to a long reading table attached to the wall, with chairs spaced along it. A couple of other people were seated there, poring through files and making notes, or filling out documents. When I set up my laptop and scanner, one of them gave me a sidelong glance. “You look like you do this kind of thing a lot,” she said. “Are you a paralegal?”
“No, attorney,” I said.
“Ah,” she said, and returned to her work.
The documents in the file were what I expected: the complaint, the information (amended once), court minutes, abstract of judgment, a few motions and oppositions. I saw that Forbush’s lawyer had gotten one count of the information dismissed, and that Forbush had, as Marv Ingalls said, pled guilty and been sentenced to state prison. There wasn’t much personal information about him in the file, but several documents had his date of birth and his address in Hanover, a town near the oil fields north of Wheaton. There were affidavits and search warrants for his apartment and car and a storage locker he had apparently been renting. I scanned what I could, but many of the documents were stapled, and I didn’t feel comfortable unfastening them, so I waited in line at the one public copy machine in the room. Since I was copying everything in the file, I didn’t inspect them too closely.
In a couple of hours, I was finished. I sent Mike a text telling him my hunt had been successful and giving him Forbush’s full name and date of birth and address at the time of his arrest, so that Mike could pass it on to Dan. With luck, we’d be able to locate him; with more luck, he might corroborate what Scanlon had told us. And now I had one more errand to run before I started for home.
I met Dot Henley at her house and, over coffee and some blueberry muffins I’d bought at a bakery in town, told her our tale of woe. “I hate to be asking for money,” I said, “but the court doesn’t want to pay for the investigation we need to do, and Mike is paying the investigator and travel expenses out of his own pocket. He doesn’t begrudge doing that, but I don’t know whether we’ll be able to pay for everything we need to do.”
Dot was surprised and sympathetic. “You’re working so hard for Howard. I didn’t realize the court wasn’t just paying for everything. Let me talk to Bob and Kevin, and I’ll let you know what we can do.”
I thanked her, and we talked a little about kids and our Thanksgiving plans before we said goodbye and I started for home. I hadn’t told Mike I was planning to do this, and I hoped he wouldn’t be upset. As court-appointed attorneys we weren’t allowed to accept legal fees from anyone else to represent Howard, but the court didn’t have a problem if we covered the expenses it wouldn’t pay out of our own pockets or someone else’s. If it would help Howard get a fair hearing, I was willing to beg a little.
It began to rain on my way home, and I drove the last miles of winding highway at a crawl in teeming darkness that swallowed up the light from my headlights. I was exh
austed, tense, and dank as I unlocked my kitchen door, shook rain from my hair, submitted to lectures about abandonment from two angry cats, and got a fire going in my stove. The message lights were lit on both my home and office phones. My home phone had two voicemails, both from Ed, telling me he’d been over to do something concerning the cider in the garage. I could see lights on in his house so I called him to let him know I was back and would pick up Charlie in the morning if that was okay. What I needed now was not a walk through the dripping woods, but some kind of hot drink with a stiff shot of brandy in it and my own bed. The office phone could wait until tomorrow.
30
I could tell it was late when I woke up. Somewhere behind the rain clouds the sun had risen, and the light was gray outside my bedroom windows. The house was chilly again—banking a fire so that it burned through a long night was not one of my talents—and the phone in my office was ringing. I decided to let it go to voicemail, put on bathrobe and slippers, and padded out to the kitchen to make coffee. While the coffee brewed, I got a fire going, noticing with a sigh that the wood rack was nearly empty. The day was presenting me with a mass of small tasks, none of them anything I really wanted to do.
After downing a cup of coffee, I called Ed, then changed into jeans, sweater, jacket, and boots and headed for his place, carrying a couple pounds of Peet’s Coffee I’d bought for him as a thank-you for taking care of Charlie.
As soon as I knocked on Ed’s door, I heard Charlie and Pogo bounding toward it, barking. Ed called out, “It’s open!” I pushed my way in past a wall of enthusiastic dogs. In addition to the usual smells of wood smoke and dog this morning, I detected a strong overtone of pine disinfectant. Forced by the rain to work indoors, Ed was cleaning his kitchen floor. He propped the sponge mop against the counter and looked toward where I was standing in the doorway. “How’d it go?” he asked.
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